Switzerland
HOME OF DRONES

Switzerland is one of the world's leading nations in drone technology: close cooperation between companies and higher education institutions and a flexible, unbureaucratic regulatory system has enabled Switzerland to create an environment that is equally attractive for start-ups, companies and the research community. This has made Switzerland a global leader in the development of drones and the required regulatory framework.
Innovations always present opportunities but also uncertainties. Drones are no exception in this respect. Pilot projects are therefore needed to gain experience and build up confidence in this new technology. This can only be done if people can see the practical benefits of using drones. Swiss drones are already in use in a wide variety of areas, including the security sector, agriculture, and the delivery of medical supplies and humanitarian aid in crisis regions. A dialogue between the public, businesses and the scientific community helps to mobilise support for these uses.
The Swiss Drone ecosystem is moving forward. Many events are taking place where you will learn about exciting projects, meet interesting people working in the drone sector and take home new ideas

Federal Councillor Doris LeuthardHead of the Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications

DRONE INNOVATORS NETWORK PRESENTED BY

The Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA) strives for high safety stand- ards and the sustainable development of Swiss civil aviation. Its activities are conducted in the interests of Swiss society and the economy and are internationally integrated and coordinated. As an independent regula- tor, the FOCA is responsible for ensuring the highest safety and security standards in Swiss civil aviation. It takes measures to promote civil avia- tion and strives for its sustainable development.
For many years, FOCA has recognised that a radical transformation is occurring in the traditional aviation with emerging technologies requiring a revolutionized enabling foundation and legal framework. To tackle the challenges of this new aviation era, FOCA has established an Innovation Management Office. The agile, risk-based legal framework therein devel- oped and perfected over the years with the fast development of drones has allowed the authority to enable these new technologies in the most effective and efficient way. FOCA’s approach has proven to provide a good balance between all the needs of the society and supported the flourishing drone ecosystem that has developed in Switzerland in the past decade.

DRONE INNOVATORS NETWORK POWERED BY

ETH Zurich is one of the world leading universities for engineering and the natural sciences. Founded in 1855, today 530 professors teach around 20,000 students - including 4,100 doctoral students - from over 120 countries. ETH Zurich is proud of the 21 Nobel Prize winners who have studied, taught or researched here and its 355 commercial spin-offs pro- duced since 1996.
The Master’s Program in Robotics, Systems and Control enables its grad- uates to develop innovative and intelligent systems. Drones and flying robots, are part of the curricula. The Autonomous System Lab, run by Prof. Roland Siegwart and the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, headed by Prof. Raffaello D’Andrea, have contributed with groundbreak- ing technologies and a number of successful spin-off companies to the booming drone’s industry.

AirMap is the world’s leading airspace management platform for drones. Millions of drones, hundreds of industry developers, and hundreds of air- space managers and stakeholders rely on AirMap’s airspace intelligence and services to fly safely and communicate with others in low-altitude airspace. AirMap connects more than 85% of the world’s drones to air- space authorities through integrations with major drone manufacturers such as DJI, Intel, senseFly, Matternet, 3DR, DroneDeploy, and more. Deployed in Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United States, AirMap leads the industry in delivering technology solutions for Unmanned aerial system (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) and U-space to enable safe and responsible drone operations at scale.

Matternet is the leading developer of an advanced technology platform for on-demand aerial delivery. The company provides its technology plat- form as a service to healthcare, e-commerce and logistics organizations. Thanks to Matternet’s extensive solutions in automated flight logistics, customer partners can implement and install modular networks of any size which are tailored to their needs.
In March 2017, Matternet became the first company in the world to re- ceive authorization for full operations of drone logistics networks over densely populated areas in Switzerland. Matternet has partnerships with some of the world’s most trusted organizations, including Swiss Post, Mercedes-Benz Vans, Swiss WorldCargo, UNICEF, the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders.

Since 2013, the drone requests at skyguide have increased tenfold in Switzerland. As more drones take off in Swiss airspace, we will need digital infrastructure that makes flying drones easier and more efficient for both drone operators and airspace managers.

To achieve that, skyguide, the Swiss air navigation service provider, and AirMap, the leading global airspace management platform for drones joined forces to develop and deploy the first national drone traffic management system in Europe: The Swiss U-space.

Features:

Blockchain-based User + Drone e-registration and e-identification

Automated and manual digital approval procedure

Connectivity between drone pilots and authorities

Live traffic alerts of nearby manned and unmanned aircraft for drone pilots

Swiss Post is at the forefront of drone development and deployment for logistics. It transports special healthcare consignments in cooperation with a range of partners in various regions of Switzerland.

Together with the drone manufacturer Matternet and partners from the healthcare sector, Swiss Post is using autonomous drones to transport laboratory samples. At present, samples are transported by road. But thanks to the use of drones, transporting these samples should become more flexible, more eco-friendly and less dependent on the traffic situa- tion. A car journey lasting 45 minutes becomes a flight of just a few min- utes in the uncongested airspace, which means true added value for our customers and by extension their patients. Swiss Post is one of the first companies in the world to operate autonomous drones in transport for commercial use. In the future drones will complement traditional parcel delivery where required, but they will not replace it.

Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading telecoms company and one of its lead- ing IT companies, is headquartered in Ittigen, close to the capital city Berne. More than 20,000 employees generated sales of CHF 2.9 billion to the end of the 1st Quarter 2018. Swisscom is one of the most sustainable companies in Switzerland and Europe.

As a leading Swiss mobile service provider Swisscom offers the eco- system an outstanding mobile network and connectivity. For the Drone Innovators Network, Swisscom offers data-driven intelligence through the analysis of the data created by its mobile network. Mobility Insights are critical insights to understand the flow of people under the drone flight path. For the event Swisscom feeds population density maps based on aggregated and anonymized data. This supports the risk assessment pro- cess of drone flights. In addition, Swisscom is actively driving forward the Swiss drone ecosystem by exploratory collaborating with various players, among them companies like INVOLI and Insightness.

Meteomatics is a weather service provider, headquartered in St Gallen, Switzerland and with offices in Berlin, Germany. Our employees with strong backgrounds in physics, mathematics, computer sciences and UAV development.

We have our own Meteodrone program that includes drone design, development and manufacture. We are authorised by the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA) to fly our drones beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) and within regulated airspace in Switzerland in order to gather observations across all level of the atmosphere up to 3km above ground level.

We ingest the output of our Meteodrone observations into our downscaled weather model to provide drone enhanced high resolution local weather forecasting.

We are also able to ingest 3rd party data (telemetry / sensor /IoT) that is combined with our weather forecasting capabilities to deliver sector specific high impact products and services such as wind farm power output forecasts.

MotionPilot is an intuitive and fun flight experience for anyone. It allows you the explore your surroundings, race against your friends and experience the world flight. It is easy to use and offers professional flight capabilities.
To control the drone, we are using motion tracking. It makes the experience immersive and fun. It allows beginner pilots to take control of the drone within seconds. The goggles, drone and controller have been designed to work together, enabling the best customer experience possible.
Betatesters are currently using the products on a daily basis. We will start selling our products at the end of 2018.

DISCOVER OUR MOST INNOVATIVE SWISS BIRDS IN THE SWISS VOLIERE!

Why is Switzerland a key player in the world of drones? Because we're a 360° drone nation! Our researchers and entrepreneurs don't just manufacture drones, they also produce sensors, engines, apps or guidance to the world bank. Few countries cover "dronistics" in this manner and that places Switzerland among the world's leading nations. Switzerland can hardly compete in the field of leisure drones where the retail price is the key to making sales. In professional drones however, the stability and the quality of the research involved are of utmost importance, and the effect of everything Swiss Made is an appreciated added value. A Swiss drone is a reliable drone that brings tangible solutions to existing problems by using and integrating the most advanced technologies. It is therefore an image booster for our country. It allows us to go beyond the clichés and talk about our research and technology centers, our industry, the role of the State or the opportunitiesto invest in Switzerland.

Nicolas BideauAmbassador and Head of Présence Suisse

Bird №1: OS4
First ever quadrotor system in free flight

OS4 was the worldwide first freely flying quadrotor drone, that was developed by the Autonomous Systems Lab at EPFL (now at ETH Zurich) in 2004. This pioneering work by Samir Bouabdallah, Roland Siegwart and others triggered many new research in the field and resulted in the current boom of the multicopter marked with millions of systems sold in the last years. After the successfully integration and demonstration of the OS4 control, some first concepts of collision avoidance, height control and automatic landing were developed in the following years and demonstrated in 2006.

Bird № 2: ATLANTIKSOLAR
Towards low-altitude multi-day endurance

Originally built for the very first Atlantic crossing of an unmanned solarpowered aircraft (thus its name), AtlanikSolar could demonstrate its longendurance capabilities multiple times: Its non-stop flight of 82 hours in summer 2015 set a new world-record in flight-endurance for UAVs of its size. By taking high-resolution images of remote glaciers in the arctic region in summer 2017, AtlantikSolar contributed to the research of glaciologists of ETH Zurich.

Bird № 3: WINGTRAONE
The VTOL drone for Mapping & Surveying

What started as an ambitious student project resulted in an easy-to-use product that’s being used all around the world. Combining the advantages of multicopters and fixed-wing aircrafts, the WingtraOne is able to take off and land vertically on spot while still offering the high endurance needed to cover large areas with a professional grade payload.

Bird № 4: VOLIRO
Free multicopters from any restrictions

A novel aerial platform that combines the advantages of existing multirotor systems with the agility of omni-directionally controllable platforms. Voliro is a hexacopter with tiltable rotors. As the rotor orientation can be fully controlled, this system allows for decoupling the control of position and orientation. This allows new kind of applications such as manipulation tasks (e.g. inspection of bridges) or stunning flight acrobatics.

Skypull is an autonomous tethered drone that climbs to and captures the power of altitude winds that are stronger, more abundant and continuous than the winds that drive conventional wind turbines. It operates like a kite and transforms the wind into kinetic energy that in turn is converted into electricity by a ground generator. By reaching higher altitudes and by avoiding heavy and cumbersome infrastructure, Skypull is cheaper and better deployable than current wind energy technologies.

Bird №6: ELIOS
Safe drone for inaccessible places

Flyability introduces the first collision-tolerant flying robot designed for industrial inspection professionals. Allowing for the first-time access to complex, cluttered or indoor places, Elios is unleashing the potential of UAVs in a number of applications where their use was previously too dangerous or simply impossible. Inspection can be performed at lower costs, downtime, and risks.

Bird №7: PACKDRONE
A human-friendly transportation drone

Dronistics is an EPFL spin-off company that develops a human-friendly drone delivery system. The company's product, PackDrone is a patented foldable drone that can carry 500 grams of payload for the distance of 2km. The PackDrone has a cage that protects people from its spinning propellers. The foldable design reduces storage volume by 92%. Additionally, Dronistics developed a web application for portable devices that enables inexperienced users to send the drone from person-to-person in an intuitive manner.

Bird № 8: EBEE PLUS
Aerial efficiency, photogrammetric accuracy

senseFly drone solutions simplify the collection and analysis of geospatial data in surveying, agriculture, engineering and humanitarian aid allowing to make better decisions, faster. Founded in 2009, senseFly is the commercial drone subsidiary of Parrot Group. Founded in 1994 by Henri Seydoux, Parrot is the leading European group in the industry of drones. World's number 2 of the consumer drone market, Parrot is also offering ‘End to End’ business solutions, covering drones, software and services focusing on : (i) Agriculture, (ii) 3D Mapping, Surveying and Inspection and (iii) Public safety.

Bird Supply №1: WINDSHAPE
WIND & WEATHER TEST FACILITIES

Nowadays, drones are present in more and more professional applications for which reliability, robustness, and stability under various weather conditions are paramount. Tracking and understanding the behavior of a drone in its natural environment is the key to a safe and optimized development. WindShape is the very first solution for testing flying machines in controlled and variable wind, thanks to a highly innovative and modular technology.